Drupal7 Experience Strategy and Goals

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leisareichelt's picture

Experience Strategy:

  • Make easy things easy and hard things do-able.
  • Design for the 80% (ref: Pareto Principle)
  • Privilege the End User

Our Goals:

  • The combination of powerful functionality, amazing community and great user experience should make Mark & I switch from Wordpress/Expression Engine to Drupal7 as soon as it is released.
  • We should be so proud of the User Experience for newcomers to Drupal that we need to redesign Drupal.org to put the download button back on the homepage.

One of the things we were least happy with in our process for the Drupal.org redesign project was the experience strategy that we developed and then hardly referenced at all. This was because it was simply too long for anyone to keep in mind - an unwieldy experience strategy, as it turns out, is not much of an experience strategy at all.

With that in mind we have drafted strategy statements and goals which we hope to use as 'stars to sail our ship by' on this project.

How do you like them?

[x-posted at disambiguity.com/drupal7-experience-strategy-goals]

Comments

I love the two "reactionary

joshmiller's picture

I love the two "reactionary goals" -- especially the 2nd one.

BTW - Leisa, are we going to be moving forward with the watch admin interface that we sketched for you at DrupalCon? (or is that use case not in the 80%?)

I don't know about the rest of the community, but I keep hoping to hear what we can do next. I feel like there is some momentum from DrupalCon and not much work seems to be happening in the social side of this project (except for this most recent blog post).

Josh

perfect

nicelobster's picture

sounds good.

While I completely agree with these...

Noyz's picture

I feel like the experience goals should cater to the new user. For example:
- make dependent tasks discoverable
- make site administration easier for outsiders
- simplify without loosing functionality.

two thoughts

beccascollan's picture

I agree with "make dependent tasks discoverable" - which I also think of as creating a more intuitive workflow, or 'what do I do next?'. We talked about this during the last usability study a bit - both new and more experienced users would struggle with where to go to complete a task (often a section not connected to where they were) or just had to click too many times to get where they needed to go (hence perhaps, some people memorizing the URL of commonly used parts of admin?). This fits in under the overall strategy, but it would help to see the strategy fleshed out a bit.

As for the strategy of privileging the end user, at first I felt skeptical about it, however on second thought I feel it's a good idea. Skeptical because the first picture that jumped into my head was the content provider, who I don't see as someone really using Drupal (though I'm sure there are exceptions, and content provider is one of many roles some people play). I feel that someone who is motivated to download Drupal and try it (for work or a project), yet has limited or no knowledge of Drupal and few resources (meaning money, community and/or programming skills in my mind) is a better primary user at this point. These people however can also be considered the end user of the sites they build :)

So I'm thinking of the "end user" as the person(s) just trying to get what they want done with their site - getting their brilliant thoughts out to the world, trying out some cool new module, making money, whatever it is. And that makes total sense - privileging the work people really want to do.

Mark Boulton Design Drupal 7 Project

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